Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a win to his anti-vaccine supporters on Thursday by reviving a task force meant to scrutinize childhood vaccines for safety.
The move to restore the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines comes days after Kennedy Jr. was rebuffed by a major medical journal over his demand that a study confirming the safety of childhood vaccines be retracted.
It also comes less than a week after a man who blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed killed a police officer outside the CDC’s headquarters in a shooting. Kennedy Jr. was slow to respond to the news of the shooting and only visited the location three days after the attack.
In an announcement on the Department of Health and Human Services website, the mission of the task force was described as “[improving] the safety, quality, and oversight of vaccines administered to American children.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote that reinstating the task force was a way to “[reaffirm] our commitment to rigorous science, continuous improvement, and the trust of American families.”
In alluding to “trust” from Americans, Bhattacharya seemed to reference rising vaccine skepticism across the country—with one poll finding that the percentage of parents who say they’ve skipped vaccines for their children has almost doubled since 2022. Measles, meanwhile, is making a comeback.
Kennedy Jr. has been a champion of the anti-vaccine movement. He founded the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that questions vaccine safety, and ran it from 2015 to 2023.
In May, that organization sued Kennedy Jr. to try to compel him to restart the childhood vaccine task force, which he has now done.
The lawsuit cited a “strong correlation between the increase in vaccine dosages routinely given to children and the sharp increase in the prevalence of autism.”
The supposed link between vaccines and autism has been debunked through several large peer-reviewed studies, but Kennedy Jr. has remained fixated on the condition.
HHS’s announcement sparked fears that Kennedy Jr. would staff the vaccine safety task force with anti-vaccine allies.
Walter Orenstein, a former member of the task force when it was active in the 90s, told The Washington Post that the task force’s revamping raises the possibility of bringing on “people who are extremely biased, who don’t have accepted scientific credentials, who have conflicts of interest.”
That scenario of events played out in June, when Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of a key vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with vaccine-skeptical members.
Retsef Levi, one of the new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is an MIT Operations Management professor.
At the ACIP’s June meeting, the first after Kennedy Jr.’s overhaul, Levi’s questions reminded one epidemiologist of a “college epidemiology class.”
“This is just a reflection of the fact that he doesn’t understand basic principles of epidemiology,” Dr. James Lawler of the University of Nebraska said about Levi.
HHS said in its announcement that senior leadership from the NIH, FDA, and CDC would serve on the vaccine safety task force. It did not detail when those task force members would be named.
An HHS spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Beast that the CDC Director, Susan Monarez, and the FDA Commissioner Marty Makary will be represented in the task force.
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